“Dreaming of our glorious debut?”
She gasped and then, defying her nerves, laughed. “I wish you’d stop sneaking up on me.”
“You’ve sneaked up on me just as often, haven’t you?” said Malachy. “Isn’t that how we met?”
“I think it’s hard to take you by surprise,” she said.
He wore jeans that looked brand-new and a brown sweater over a pale blue T-shirt. “So, shall we head over early, get front-row seats?”
For the Fourth of July, they had a rare night off. Daphne was surprised; only a minority of their teachers and conductors could claim this holiday as theirs. On the other hand, who didn’t love fireworks? Most of the campers had crowded into cars to head for the display in the nearest town, but according to the solfège master, if you went to the strip of beach, or anywhere along the lake, you could watch the fireworks go off in several towns on the opposite shore.
The spot where they had first talked—which Daphne still thought of as hers, still enjoyed alone most afternoons—was empty. Through the woods, she heard a few people talking on their way to the beach. They sounded like adults, not campers.
Malachy had brought along a blanket and a Hershey bar. By the time they settled comfortably, the sky was almost indistinguishable from the water, both a fathomless gemstone blue.
“I want my money back if the show isn’t good enough,” said Malachy. “But first. Do we save the chocolate or eat it right now?”
“Now,” said Daphne.
“I agree. Now is almost always the better choice. You never know about later.” He unwrapped the bar and broke it in two. He held out the halves, waved them around a moment, and said, “One promises fame, the other happiness. Be careful which one you choose.”
She laughed; he was always making her laugh. “Will you tell me which is which?”
“Of course not. And I’m not sure which one I’d choose.”
“Then don’t share. Take both.”
He shook his head. “Can’t have both.”
“Can’t you?” said Daphne. “So you think Esme McLaughlin is unhappy? I mean, she certainly has the fame.”
Malachy gave her a look of mock disbelief. “I am talking about the virtue of sharing. My mother brought me up to share. That is why I can’t have both.” He bit into one half and handed her the other. “There you go, Miss Indecisive. One way or another, our fates are sealed.”
There had been several concerts since opening night, but the girls couldn’t stop talking about Esme: was it fair to have so much talent and beauty at once? Talent that was rewarded. Because they all knew that being gifted alone promised you nothing—oh no, as their teachers repeatedly warned, not without the work.
“Work, it is zee ox-ee-gen of art,” droned Natalya when they wearied of playing the same measures over and over again.
At last it was dark. A number of boats had anchored, also awaiting the show. It began with a starburst of orange to their left, a casual crackling, a muffled boom.
“Ooh,” said Malachy. “And aah. And ooh again.”
Tentatively, Daphne leaned against him. He did not lean away.
They watched as the fireworks rose, geyserlike, from an unseen source: higher and higher, more varied in color, their reflections projecting farther and farther on the surface of the lake, as if reaching toward the two of them.
“I’ve never had private fireworks before,” said Daphne.
“Then you’re a virgin?”
She was stunned. Her arm, against his, felt glued in place.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m prone to bad jokes. That’s how I am.” He put his arm around her shoulder.
“I like how you are.” She kept her voice level. When he didn’t make another joke, she put a hand on his leg. “Can I just say it? How different you are? From the other guys here? Like you’re older. Even if you’re not.” Of course, maybe it was just that he had finished high school a year early, while Daphne still had a year to go.
“I told you. I’m a weirdo.”
“Maybe I’m one, too.” Takes one to know one, she could have said. “Not you, Swan.”
“Maybe you should stop calling me that.”
“I thought you liked it.”
“I do. Or I did. But it’s like …” She wanted to hear him say her name, hear how he would say it. Would that tell her how he felt? Her friends at home said that if a guy wanted you, he’d make the moves on you the first chance he found: jump your bones, she’d heard her brother say, typically crude. But Malachy was obviously different. Maybe he was courtly. Maybe he was shy: clever but shy. Why did boys have to be the ones to make the moves?
Awkwardly, but with an optimist’s determination, she faced him, took hold of his face, and turned it toward hers. (Not as if she hadn’t made out before—though never with a boy like this one.)
He kissed her back, but carefully. It felt as if he were studying her lips with his; a few seconds later his mouth opened, just slightly. He groaned, the way boys always did when they realized they had your permission, and he put his arms around her. They lay back on the blanket, laughing briefly at the impact of the rock when their heads met the ground. They kissed for a long time, and at some point the fireworks ceased, the chorus of crickets rose, and the air grew colder around them.
He was the one who stopped. “Daphne.”
“You said my name,” she whispered.
“Daphne, is this …”
“Are you going to ask if this is a good idea? We wouldn’t be the only ones. Mei Mei and Craig …” Don’t talk, she told herself. Listen. Did he have a girlfriend at home? If he did, he had never mentioned her.
Malachy sat up and rubbed his face, looking out at the lake.
She sat up beside him. “I just. I want …” She could hear her friend Lucy saying, Never tell them, never be the first one to say it! It’s the kiss of death!
But Malachy said, “I know. I like you, too. I do. Daphne.”
She ran a hand along his back, his knuckled spine. He stroked her shin.
“But this summer,” he said.
“I know,” she said quickly, before he could continue. “My mom says it’s the time of our lives, and we need to focus on our work, I know that. But we’re doing that, and we won’t blow it. We won’t stop working as hard as we are.”
“I’m not worried about that.” He sounded suddenly cold, almost indignant. “I’m just thinking that all this … intensity, that how we feel about everything here, everything and everybody, it’s so …”
She hadn’t known him to struggle with words, and it made her feel powerful. “If it gets in the way of work, we’ll stop. But it won’t.”
To her dismay, he stood up. But he took her hand and pulled her to her feet.
“So that song,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s Erik Satie,” he said. “Esme’s song. I ran into Esme’s piano player on my way over. Aren’t you impressed that I remembered to ask after all this time?”
Daphne stared at him, openly confused.
He touched her forehead with one finger. “ ‘Je te veux.’ The encore.”
How could she have forgotten? She thought of Esme leaning down as her voice plunged into its lowest register. If someone had taken an EKG of Daphne’s heart just then … “Erik Satie,” she said as lightly as she could. “I don’t really know his work. Honestly, not at all.”
Malachy led the way through the bushes, back to the path. He held up a branch so that Daphne could pass beneath it. “Always more to learn,” he said. “That’s the pain and the pleasure.”
3
Things I Wish Were True
THE MEN FROM THE medical equipment company were exceptionally kind for deliverymen: unrushed, careful to wipe up the snow they tracked onto the front hall carpet. In the living room, they offered to move the long damask sofa into the back hallway. Lucinda had already managed, in this reorchestration of furniture, to move the gateleg table from the hallway to a co
rner of the den. Passing down the hall will be awkward now—the sofa is much wider than the table—but Lucinda is the only one who needs to get to the pantry.
Now, like a tyrant who’s pulled off an overnight coup, a hospital bed commands attention where the sofa has defined the room’s commerce for more than forty years. She could have banished Zeke to the den, but he’ll be happier with the view he loves best: the patchwork of irregular fields, stitched with stonewalls, that represents the last of his father’s once-sprawling farm. By the time Zeke Senior died, he owned land that straddled the borders of two adjacent towns. Since this is New England, not Iowa, his green empire included tracts of judiciously timbered woodland, but his main enterprise, the source of his pride, was the herd of Jersey cows that grazed the hilly pastureland: a firm stand against the encroaching Holsteins, champion producers but only in quantity. “Milk as thin and tasteless as wash water,” Zeke’s father would say. “Though modern fools care only about how much, not how good.”
A glass case crowded with trophies and ribbons, many won by her husband and his brothers when they were boys—a few, and this still amazes her, won by her own sons—serves as a museum to her father-in-law’s standards. When he was alive, the case monopolized the longest wall of the living room; after his death, Lucinda lobbied for it to be moved to the den. The living room wall now displays four landscapes by an artist who paints the natural beauties of Vermont.
Jersey herds have gone the way of most independent farms. Nevertheless, when Zeke faced selling off some of his inherited share of the land—a decision both practical and thrifty—he sold most of it to idealistic entrepreneurs, typically rich New Yorkers and Bostonians who wanted to try their hand at growing heirloom kale or fussing over goats. Zeke once described such ventures as “the number one New Age hobby-loss line item,” but he finds them far preferable to the housing developments that pour down the picturesque slopes on the tract of land left to his older brother.
Lucinda did not remove the Chinese rug, though the deliverymen warned her that the wheels of the bed, when locked, might damage it. Never mind. She is hopeful the bed won’t be here too long. She will not turn this room into a clinic.
In an hour, her daughter, Christina, will arrive in that profligate minivan of hers, and they will drive to the rehab center, to bring Zeke home. If she puts her mind to it, Lucinda can accomplish a lot in that hour—though all she wants to do is to lie down upstairs, forget it all in sleep for just this last sliver of time alone. Tonight she’ll sleep on the foldout in the den—to be nearer Zeke in case he panics or becomes disoriented in the middle of the night.
All right then: the flowers. With no time to visit the florist on her round of errands, she chose the least sorry specimens at the grocery store: yellow roses that are flawless in form but smell like old ice cubes. She scans the high shelves in the pantry and chooses a vase of dark blue glass.
After trimming and arranging the roses, Lucinda takes a package of boneless chicken breasts out of the freezer. Bake them in tomato sauce with herbs and capers? Or maybe that’s too acidic for Zeke, after all the bland geriatric food at the center. She worries that she never heard him complain about those meals; did the stroke rob him of taste as well as mobility? (Zeke loves eating out and eating well, loves the richness of French food, the spice of Thai, anything assertive in flavor. The few seasons she campaigned with him on the deli/BBQ/doughnut tour—DBD heartburn their name for the usual payback—they would end each day, alone in their bedroom, by listing the abominable foods they’d had to eat with such gusto. She was relieved to stay home when, after two terms, Zeke’s seat was secure.)
Safer, she decides, to sauté the chicken in butter, mix it with pasta—shells, not spaghetti—and peas. Early this morning, she baked a pear pie.
When she opens the refrigerator to check on the ingredients—yes, good, a block of Parmesan—she decides on a glass of white wine; Christina will do all the driving. She pours a glass and sets it aside. First, she’ll grate the cheese and put a large pot of water on the stove. Should she set the table? Will Zeke be able to sit at a table yet? Stairs are out of the question for at least a month, the therapist said, but didn’t she say he’d be able to get around with a walker? Suddenly, Lucinda is terrified of being home alone with her husband in his abruptly altered state.
Your husband has a stroke: a common fate for women her age, yet it’s hardly something you plan for. She imagines an educational seminar at the town’s Senior Health Colloquium, called “In the All Too Likely Event” or “Worst-Case Scenarios.” More practical than chair caning, holiday crafts, or Pilates (unpleasantly, Lucinda thinks of Pontius every time she sees that mystifying word).
She carries her wine into the living room and stops. Her habitual place on the sofa is gone because, of course, the sofa is gone. She chooses one of the wingback chairs flanking the fireplace—not the one where Zeke always sits but the one that belonged by custom to his father. (At Christmas, her son Mal used to joke that he could see his grandfather’s ghost in this chair, warming his bony butt by the fire.) So now she faces the hospital bed, its taut sheets covered with a quilt she brought from upstairs, the one she made for Jonathan when he was ten: red airplanes, appliquéd square after square, on a pale blue sky. When Lucinda ordered the ugly, sinister bed, she knew this moment would come, the past hurtling forward into the present.
Twenty years ago, after her older son’s final stay in the hospital—though, since he had survived so many infections by then, beaten so many odds, she did not see it that way—his doctor had suggested renting a bed like this one. She had even helped Lucinda order it. Hours before Mal’s discharge, Lucinda directed the men up the steep stairs of the city brownstone to her son’s apartment; remarkably, the bed made it all the way up. They were clearly familiar with maneuvering such a bulky item through narrow spaces.
But Mal refused to sleep in that bed. “I see you’ve summoned the chariot of Thanatos,” he said when he saw it, a jarring addition to his small but stylish living room. “Well, no thank you, Mom. I’ll hail a cab when it’s time to go. Preferably a Checker.”
The insult of the bed was minor compared with the insult of his disease, which long before then had made a mockery of his dignity, his body, even his job at the paper—from which he’d been forced to retire. He was thirty-eight years old when he died. Until the very end, Lucinda wanted to believe that Mal’s illness had also stolen his faith, so that saving his soul would be a matter merely of reclaiming it. In his last years, he told her repeatedly that he had never felt that kind of devotion, but she wouldn’t believe it, not entirely, not until he chose to end his own life rather than live out the course of God’s plan. Who could honestly say there had been no hope of recovery? Now, belatedly, she understands that void all too well, that dark cavity widening around the heart, that pitch-black hollow at the bottom of her rib cage.
She was so deeply alone with Mal’s death. That he had died of AIDS, a disease barely touching their staid rural community, seemed to embarrass even her best friends, no matter how genuine their condolences. Christina was immersed in raising babies, a task she undertook with the same ferocity she had applied to studying and practicing law. Jonathan, adrift in his own life, flew from California to New York and tried, mutely, clumsily—and, in retrospect, fearfully—to help his mother cope with his brother’s “affairs” (such a painful word to Lucinda in the context of the disease, which killed Mal before he could find any sort of lasting love). Jonathan did tackle the essential work of packing the most portable contents of his brother’s elegant apartment and shipping them to Vermont. For that much, Lucinda was grateful.
Zeke had been preoccupied with a possible run for a seat in Congress. Though he took a week’s break from all the necessary scheming, he was constantly on the phone. Two months later, almost overnight, he dropped the notion of higher office. Sometimes Lucinda wonders if all that networking, glad-handing, and calculated stroking of wealthy egos had simply been the best wa
y for Zeke to hold on to his sanity. One of them had to stay sane, and it couldn’t have been Lucinda.
Without consulting her, Zeke bought airline tickets to Italy that summer. He had rented a house near Perugia for a week. Lucinda had no desire to go anywhere yet no will to resist. Because she couldn’t even think about packing, Christina filled an absurdly large suitcase for her mother with a wide range of outfits. It was featherlight next to the sorrow Lucinda was sure she would carry with her forever: so heavy, so immutably leaden, that she half expected to set off alarms as she and Zeke passed through airport security in Boston.
Italy was a colossal mistake. Everywhere, everywhere—in churches, in museums, even etched into the façades of buildings—Lucinda encountered Mary. Mary receiving the miraculous news. Mary holding her chosen baby son, a golden dinner plate perched on his head. Mary at the foot of the cross; Mary—visibly shattered; forget whatever prophecy some angel had revealed—cradling the beaten, lacerated, bloodied corpse of Jesus. The stigmata painted on his hands and feet were the color of the poppies that bloomed along the Umbrian roads, their petals fluttering in the dusty air stirred by passing trucks and cars.
Zeke did not share Lucinda’s faith (though now and then, with an eye on his constituents rather than the Lord, he tagged along to Mass). So he couldn’t understand that beyond this tauntingly ubiquitous reminder of losing a son, and to such a cruel death, Lucinda felt keenly the sacrilege of aligning her pain with the Virgin’s incomparably holy anguish. All at once she could not accept the inevitability, let alone the celebration, inherent to the Passion; Mary was that boy’s mother. If God were the least bit merciful, she’d have died first. And where was Joseph when she needed him most? (Perhaps he’d been busy contemplating a run for Congress.)
After their second day of sightseeing, a day of wandering the lofty rose-colored lanes of Assisi—Lucinda waiting outside the basilica while Zeke went in to admire the frescos—she refused to leave the rented house. It was large and magnificently old, though its stone walls sealed inside its rooms a damp, tomblike chill. At Lucinda’s insistence, Zeke would go out alone for the day. She would sit under the awning over the patio, sometimes attempting to read a novel but mostly staring out at the neighboring fields, exactly as she’d been doing back at home. The one welcome difference was the privacy. No one came by to take the temperature of her grief. No one asked her if she had been eating or sleeping. No one tempted her to wonder, so uncharitably, if their motives were more prurient than loving. And perhaps because of the privacy, she did not cry so much. She wrote falsely reassuring postcards to Christina and Jonathan, and she thought about a quilt she might make if she could find fabrics in the particular blues, greens, and fleshy pinks of her surroundings.